This paper examines how the cognitive framework of collective mindfulness complements tenets of user experience in public health crisis communication. Collective mindfulness attunes an organization into preemptively identifying and avoiding potential failures that can have adverse safety and public relations outcomes. To illustrate the connection between this cognitive framework and user experience, this article shares findings from a case study with the 2014 Johns Hopkins Medicine Ebola Crisis Communications Team, whose primary goals were to improve the usability of Ebola personal protective equipment protocols and to prepare healthcare providers for a U.S. Ebola crisis. Based on a grounded theory investigation, this article suggests that the collective mindfulness principles of deference to expertise, resilience, and refusal to simplify complex procedures informed the team's ability to avoid a catastrophic communication failure. Additionally, these principles allowed the team to attune to key user experience principles, including addressing user context and user limitations.

The concept of usability is often connected to the setting - or context - in which individuals perform an activity. International settings complicate such relationships by introducing new variables that affect usability in different locations. In international health and medical communication, this situation can create problems that affect the health and wellness of patients in other nations and cultures. International patient experience design (I-PXD) presents a heuristic for addressing this situation. I-PXD helps individuals identify variables affecting usability in different international contexts. Persons working in health and medical communication can use this I-PXD heuristic to address usability expectations in various international contexts.

Successfully engaging in a health- or medical-related activity is a matter of understanding what one needs to do. This means information used in this context needs to be easy to use. Accomplishing the goals laid out in the essay will facilitate understanding and allow for effective use. Thus, successful medical and health communication are connected to one central concept: usability. But how to achieve this goal? The answer is through patient-focused design practices that help mirror the experiences of patients who are using such materials. This entry overviews such an approach - which I call patient experience design (PXD) - and explains why such an approach is central to best health and medical communication practices.

Online course material development requires much writing, often catching faculty by surprise because of either the sheer volume or the specialized role and function of writing in an online only and multimodal environment. technical and professional communication (TPC) faculty are uniquely suited to coach faculty in producing readable writing for online courses. This article explores the professional development strategies and coaching skills necessary for TPC instructors and/or practitioners to serve in this role in online course development training.

International interest in technical communication education is growing as more individuals gain online access worldwide. This factor means technical communication educators might find themselves developing online classes for students located in other nations. Doing so requires an understanding of aspects affecting international interactions in such educational contexts. This article examines central factors—or friction points—that technical communication instructors must understand and address to offer effective online educational experiences to globally distributed students.

The author reports on social media research in technical and professional communication (TPC) training through a national survey of 30 professional and technical communication programs asking about their use of social media in technical communication. This research forms the basis of recommendations for training online TPC faculty to teach with social media. The author offer recommendations throughout for those who train online TPC faculty as well as for the teachers themselves.

This article addresses emerging calls for online education and cross-cultural technical communication training, specifically by outlining and reporting on the development and sustainability of two online programs: the graduate online technical and professional writing certificate and the emerging undergraduate bilingual professional writing certificate at the University of Texas at El Paso. Data presented suggest cultural and linguistic diversity should be embedded and streamlined across all aspects of online technical communication programs.

This article reports on an effort by the authors to use usability testing as a component of online teacher training for their multimajor technical communication course. The article further explains the ways in which program administrators at other institutions can create their own usability testing protocols for formative online teacher training in course design and in principles of user-centered design.

Online writing courses have developed in importance to meet student learning and institutional expectations; over time, a controversy about training online instructors and building sustainable programs has emerged. This article relates training demands within the University of Arizona’s Writing Program and development of an online professional & technical writing certificate. The article proposes training instructors with master courses and building a sustained program through a participatory design to create a professional and integrated environment.

Design has come to be understood as an essential aspect of the work that technical communicators claim. As a result, research in the field of technical communication has approached studies of design in numerous ways. This article showcases how technical communication researchers assume the roles of observers, testers, critics, creators, and consultants in their handling of design artifacts. Such a model regarding these roles may help us to better understand the design relationships researchers presume as they further knowledge of design within our field. This article offers a framework to leverage into a comprehensive and integrated model for explaining our work on design to others outside of technical communication.

This article uses a historical perspective to describe the development of the profession of technical communication through three ages: Brass, Beige, and Glass. I compare this development to the growth of the academic discipline and both to the explosion of noninstitutional technical communication—the growing body of tactical technical communication that happens outside of organizations and institutions. This leads me to describe today as the Golden Age of technical communication. I conclude that we should broaden the scope of technical communication and spread it as a set of skills valuable for everyone to learn.

Technical communication research has critically engaged with organizational trends toward flattened organizations like networks, horizontal arrangements, and adhocracies, assemblages that hybridize top-down management in favor of autonomous groups. There has been no engagement with a related but distinct trend: worker cooperatives. Co-ops promise similar advantages but are distinct as they claim to deliver what flat organizations promise: access to governance, empowerment, and autonomy. In this article, I survey literature on flattened organizations, apply technical communication theory to account for cooperative communication, and conclude with an analysis from a qualitative study at a cooperative site.

This study focuses on start-up entrepreneurs on the move—in coordination with an array of other actors—as they weave and are woven into transnational networks. Central to this study is a shift from activity to mobility systems. Building on technical communication scholarship, the frame integrates actor networks and activity theory knotworks. Disrupting workplace and national container models (methodological nationalism), the analysis is grounded in a study of Israeli start-up entrepreneurs. Dubbed the Start-Up Nation, Israel contains more start-ups per capita than any other country in the world, with its high-tech industry made up of a dense ecosystem of conferences, accelerators, meetups, social media, and coworking spaces. Tracing actants’ trajectories across this social field, the author argues for a conceptualization of entrepreneurs as knotworkers who mobilize genres, modes, languages, and spaces.

This book examines some of the many struggles that various programs in the field have endured in light of the "Great Recession" and shares the faculty’s initiative to take action to ensure the sustainability of their programs. Eleven essays written by 20 different contributors from a range of institutions assist in successfully achieving the book’s purpose—namely, providing methods and models for how academic programs can “do more with less” in an age of austerity. Program coordinators and those who teach program assessment should take heart in knowing that they do not face these challenges alone, and they might use this book to brainstorm and identify solutions for their programs.

Research problem: Business-to-business contracts are complex communication artifacts, often considered “legal stuff” and the exclusive domain of lawyers. However, many other stakeholders without a legal background are involved in the negotiation, drafting, approval, and implementation of contracts, and their contributions are essential for successful business relationships. How can we ensure that all stakeholders in the global business context-whatever their native language or professional background-easily and accurately understand contract documents? This study suggests that integrating diagrams in contracts can result in faster and more accurate comprehension, for both native and non-native speakers of English. Literature review: We focused on the following research topics: (1) ways to integrate text and visuals to create more effective instructions, since we conceptualize contracts as a type of business instructions; (2) cognitive load theory, as it may help explain why contracts are so hard to understand and why text-visuals integration may ameliorate their understandability; (3) cognitive styles, as individual differences may affect how individuals process verbal and visual information, thus allowing us to explore the limitations of our suggested approach; (4) the English lingua franca spoken by business professionals in international settings, their needs and challenges, and the fact that pragmatic approaches are needed to ensure successful communication. Methodology: We conducted an experiment with 122 contract experts from 24 countries. The research participants were asked to complete a series of comprehension tasks regarding a contract, which was provided in either a traditional, text-only version or in a version that included diagrams as complements to the text. In addition to measuring answering speed and accuracy, we asked the participants to provide information about their educational background, mother tongue, and perceived mental effort in task completion, and to complete an object-spatial imagery and verbal questionnaire to assess their cognitive style. Conclusions: We found that integrating diagrams into contracts supports faster and more accurate comprehension; unexpectedly, legal background and different cognitive styles do not interact with this main effect. We also discovered that both native and non-native speakers of English benefit from the presence of diagrams in terms of accuracy, but that this effect is particularly strong for non-native speakers. The implication of this study is that adding diagrams to contracts can help global communicators to understand such documents more quickly and accurately. The need for well-designed contracts may open new opportunities for professional writers and information designers. Future research may also go beyond experimental evaluations: by observing this new genre of contracts in vivo, it would be possible to shed light on how contract visualizations would be perceived and interpreted in a global communication environment.

The book’s 11 chapters consider the importance of theorizing, initiating, and sustaining relationships between academia and industries that employ graduates of those programs. The editors argue that a strong future for the field depends on more research into shared interests. Through asking both spheres to take action, Carolyn Rude’s Foreword clarifies that the audience for the book is both academics and industry professionals. Comprehensively, the book fulfills its goal to initiate a conversation; it is a sourcebook that explores multiple contexts and lenses. Therefore, readers looking for a practical resource for initiating partnerships with businesses and industries can easily identify and select the chapters relevant to their situation.

Background: This paper examines creativity in content management (CM) by presenting a case study analysis of an original, open-source, Web-based learning-management system (LMS). It explores existing literature and suggests new ideas about creativity and CM. Research questions: How can we conceptualize creativity in relation to CM? How can creativity be operationalized into specific design practices within CM? What dimensions of creativity should be considered when designing or evaluating creative CM systems?Situating the case: Theoretical research in content-management systems (CMSs) and LMSs has revealed a gap in our field's current understanding of how creativity relates to CM. Research studies related to the measurement of creativity have provided insight into characteristics and methodologies that could be adopted and adapted to evaluate creativity in CM. Studies from the learning sciences have investigated where LMSs fall short and suggested where new opportunities exist to better facilitate the informational needs of users. These works have pointed to a need for research on integrating creativity and CM, both in content and in the systems that manage content, and have laid the groundwork for this study. Methodology: This research investigates theories of creativity as they relate to CM by conducting a case study analysis of unique instructional software designed to deliver content to students enrolled in a university course. The primary evidence is taken from notes about the design and evaluation of the software and from survey data illustrating students' user experiences. About the case: We developed a classification strategy for exploring creativity along three dimensions-importance, novelty, and affect-and then used this strategy to explore a unique system's approach to deal with content challenges in each of those areas. User experience impressions provide evidence of successes and failures of experimental CM in these domains. Conclusions: The study finds that this original LMS design did contain features that exhibited novelty, importance, and affect, and that such features can be used to identify creativity in product design as well as to assess the design of complex software systems such as CMSs and LMSs. This detailed analysis of an original design for an LMS suggests new ideas for implementing and using CMSs and LMSs in technical communication. The study concludes by presenting a rubric for evaluating creativity in CMSs and LMSs, or for designing such systems with creativity in mind.

User experience (UX), a common practice in corporate settings, is new for many nonprofit organizations. This case study details a community-based research project between nonprofit staff at a community health center and UX professionals to improve the design and usability of a document designed to help immigrant patients sign up for health insurance. UX professionals may need to adapt and be flexible with their efforts, but can offer valuable skills to community partners. Research questions: (1) What are the information needs and barriers faced by immigrant populations signing up for health insurance? (2) How does a usability study, adapted to meet the needs of immigrant populations, inform the design of a supplemental guidebook about health insurance? (3) What are the challenges and opportunities when engaging in community-based UX research projects? Situating the case: Other community-based research projects in technical communication and UX point to the need for a clear conceptualization of participation, a strong partnership with nonprofits, and the need to develop meaningful and actionable insights. Furthermore, when conducting studies with immigrant populations, the role of the translator on the research team is crucial. Methodology: As a community-based research project focused on the collaborative generation of practical knowledge, we conducted a usability study with 12 participants in two language groups, Chinese and Vietnamese, to evaluate the design and usability of a guidebook designed to provide guidance about enrolling in a health insurance plan. Data were analyzed to identify usability concerns and used to inform a second iteration of the guidebook. About the case: Immigrant populations struggle to sign up for health insurance for a variety of reasons, including limited English and health insurance literacy. As a result, a nonprofit community health center developed a guidebook to support immigrant populations. Version 1 of this guidebook was evaluated in a usability study, with results showing that users struggled to correctly choose a plan, determine their eligibility, and interpret abstract examples. As a result, Version 2 was designed to support the in-person experience, reduce visual complexity, and support patients' key questions. Conclusions: Community-based UX collaborations can amplify the expertise of UX and nonprofit professionals. However, UX methods may need to be adapted in community-based projects to better incorporate local knowledge and needs.

This article examines how the levels of student interaction change through the use of small groups and moderators in online writing courses. The study examines three technical and professional online writing courses: one course that employs small groups and group moderators and two courses that have no small groups or moderators. The results of this study show that the amount of interaction between students in online writing courses increases dramatically by incorporating small groups and peer moderators.

Simple drawing tasks are effective for evaluating the many options communicators have during early design stages. These drawing strategies leverage the metaphoric meanings of basic geometric shapes, not complex artistic illustration, to represent ideas while they are in development. Our paper supports this perspective by linking previous research on sketching, collaboration, and ideation to identify a specific approach to this kind of drawing that we term Geometric Page Forms. To further illustrate the value of these strategies, we give an example of how technical communicators used drawing during a workshop to develop communication solutions explaining complex information about sun block efficacy.

As a scholar who works at the intersections of technical communication and rhetoric of science, I like to think I know a little bit about effective approaches to communicating technical information. For over a decade, I've been a happy member of a seemingly productive research discipline devoted to understanding how best to communicate scientific and technical information to clients, stakeholders, employers, funders, and the general public. I am, of course, not alone in these endeavors and my work benefits substantially from the efforts of my many colleagues in the Association for Teachers of Technical Writing and the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine. Now, given this background, imagine my surprise when one of my colleagues forwarded me a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine decrying the state of science communication research in America. Indeed, I was shocked and saddened to see the report call for "building a coherent science communication research enterprise" with the obvious implication that no such enterprise currently exists (p. 74).

As complex and adaptive environments, workplaces have long been a subject of study in the field of technical communication and an area of concern in Clay Spinuzzi’s scholarship. In All Edge, howeve...

To make technical communication scholarship more reflective of the complexity of work done by such communicators, a new concept that marries recent parallel turns to ethics and invention is needed. German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a stranger to the field, offers such a concept: responsibility. It covers more explanatory ground than the most cited of ethical concepts, deliberation, and most importantly, centers ethics and invention squarely within the technical communicator’s relationship to language.

Component content management (CCM) enables organizations to create, manage, and deliver content as small components rather than entire documents. As CCM methodologies, processes, and technologies are increasingly adopted, CCM is reshaping technical communication (TC), the roles of technical communicators, and the skills they need for career success. This article reviews scholarly and trade publications that describe changes in roles and needed skills in CCM environments and identifies implications of these changes for TC education.

Tenure-line faculty—teaching onsite or online—are typically perceived as resident scholars and instructors who live local to their institutions. A geographically diversified tenure-line faculty, however, could also serve the education of students by bringing a wider array of influences and opportunities to the online classroom. Programs in technical communication must examine how to incorporate extralocated faculty and how to prepare willing and eligible faculty for extralocated teaching, research, and service.

This article aims to help doctoral students in technical communication prepare themselves for the academic job market and for the subsequent process of earning tenure and promotion in increasingly demanding environments. The authors propose that students do four things: (a) learn to spot and articulate research problems; (b) find their vocation—the work to which they feel a personal calling—within technical communication; (c) identify the research methods that best suit their personalities; and (d) articulate a research identity and agenda that they can explain at three different levels of abstraction: describing individual projects, naming the coherent themes that connect these projects, and defining themselves concisely as scholars. All these orienting practices involve students in stepping back, looking for larger patterns in their work and in their professional interests, and finding specific language to represent them.

To address graduate writing pedagogy in technical communication, this article reports on a study of 14 award-winning dissertations in the field. By treating dissertations as cultural artifacts constitutive of the educational contexts in which they are authored, this study reads dissertation methodology sections as research narratives to understand how we prepare new scholars and to examine the changing nature of what we value in the field.

Big data is one of the most hyped buzzwords in both academia and industry. This article makes an early contribution to research on big data by situating data theoretically as a historical object and arguing that much of the discourse about the supposed transparency and objectivity of big data ignores the crucial roles of interpretation and communication. To set forth that analysis, this article engages with recent discussion of big data and “smart” cities to show the communicative practices operating behind the scenes of large data projects and relate those practices to the profession of technical communication.

This article examines the teaching of a multimodal pedagogy in an online technical communication classroom. Based on the results of an e-portfolio assessment, the authors argue that multimodality can be taught successfully in the online environment if the instructor carefully plans and scaffolds each assignment. Specifically, they argue for an increased emphasis within the technical communication classroom on teaching the e-portfolio as a genre that not only exemplifies students’ multimodal literacies but also establishes their identities as technical communicators in the 21st century. This article provides a model for teaching multimodal composition in the online technical communication classroom and calls for more scholarship on teaching the e-portfolio in the digital environment.

Humans are so enmeshed in mobility systems that they identify with themselves through those systems. InCommunicating Mobility and Technology: A Material Rhetoric for Persuasive Transportation,Ehren Pflugfelder (2017) uses the term "automobility" to describe both "the specific kinds of mobility afforded by independent, automobile-related movement technologies" and "the complex cultural, bodily, technological, and ecological ramifications of our dependence on separate mobility technologies" (p. 4). Given identities enmeshed in ecologies of systems involving human and nonhuman actors through which transportation emerges, automobility is described as a "wicked problem" to be solved, in part, by technical communicators and communication designers naming and revealing the persuasive power of transportation systems. Understanding this persuasive power benefits practitioners by revealing the shared agency of automobility among the car-driver assemblage, and academics, by offering a framework for recognizing transportation as persuasive and therefore rhetorical.

As the healthcare system in the United States becomes more complex, so does the information needed for administrators and clinicians to keep apprised of new regulatory and systemic changes. In this article, I use a review and analysis of an online resource project to identify effective practices to educate and support healthcare safety net organizations, or those clinics that serve low-income populations. The project team consisted primarily of healthcare researchers who used a systematic review of the scholarly literature to develop online systems for transmitting information about healthcare payment and service delivery reform to those serving low income populations. As the technical communicator working on this project, the author advocated incorporating concepts of user research and user-centered design to the project team. This research included a survey of provider-users. The analysis of this project revealed that, in the health and medical community, evidence-based medicine and the genre of systematic literature review may be privileged such that provider-user needs for information seeking are not taken into account when designing online communication based on these reviews. Communication designers may need to work with and adapt the work of translation science and knowledge-to-action to develop more user-centered online content for provider education.

Ray Gallon's collection The Language of Technical Communication attempts to standardize the terminology used in the field by offering concise definitions for 52 key terms, each authored by a contributor with relevant expertise. As a reference work, this book resists summarization. In this review, I will instead assess the text according to criteria appropriate for a reference: ease of use, selection of included terms, and quality of the definitions provided. Although Gallon forwards no explicit thesis, by prioritizing information related to content management, the book does make a claim about the future of communication design. Individuals who are new to the field or whose responsibilities are expanding into content management will find The Language of Technical Communication valuable, while scholars and experienced communication designers will appreciate the contributors' consistent emphasis on the future of the discipline.

Professional practices in technical communication are increasingly being challenged by the emergence of collaborative media that enable users to access technical information created by non-professionals. At the same time, these technologies also allow technical communicators to provide a continually expanding audience with knowledge and skills needed now more than ever. Through a co-design case study, researchers developed a new and innovative platform for producing and distributing technical information including user-generated content. Moreover, the events of the case included market strategies in which a professional organization moved from a reactive to a more proactive position on collaborative media. In so doing, they outlined a set of new professional roles for technical communicators including editors, curators, facilitators, and community managers.

This entry defines value from users' perspectives and discusses the need to consider "user value" as an important framework for enhancing product usability in technical communication. Arguing it is essential to involve users in the process of product design, the paper emphasizes the need to recognize users as value co-creators. To further enhance and extend the study of usability, this article proposes a value proposition approach to design and notes such an approach can help communication designers effectively design, test, and deliver materials end users want and value.

On 9--10 October 2013, the information system research group at Mid Sweden University arranged an international scientific meeting on the theme Technical Information (TI). The event's organizers consciously kept the theme broad, but they also intentionally paired this general theme with a number of subthemes, namely Organizational Learning, Information Design, Information Management and Organizational Benefit. The objective of this design was to examine this overall topic from a range of perspectives.

Technical support, a traditional practice of technical communication, is rapidly changing due to the ubiquitous use of digital technologies (Spinuzzi, 2007). In fact, many technology companies now have dedicated Twitter accounts specifically for providing technical support to end users. In response to this changing technical support landscape, we conducted an empirical study of Twitter-based interactions among six companies and their customers in order to examine the nature of the emerging technical support genre on Twitter. Among other findings, we discovered technical support was widely sought among the customers of the companies studied (Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Samsung, Hewlett Packard, and Dell) with nearly 200,000 tweets recorded in just a 38-day timespan. We also found a majority of individuals used Twitter to complain about a brand as opposed to seeking support for a specific technical problem. In our entry, we discuss the implications of these and other findings for technical communication practitioners and researchers who design for technical documentation in social media contexts.

The help documentation landscape has changed with the growth of various forms of social media. People now post how-to videos to YouTube, they write crowdsourced documentation for open-source software, and they participate in and draw from a wide range of help forums. These forums are a form of crowdsourced help information in which experts and amateurs come together to address questions and explain materials. While these online forums can be thought of as a threat to the roles of technical communicators, they also present opportunities for professionals to adapt their skills to new roles as "community managers" of professionally sponsored forums. This article examines that point by showing how communication design is important for developing online help forum communities. Through the analysis of ethnographic and interview data, the article covers different areas of design important for understanding help forums as networked forms of technical communication.

Technical communicators, engineers, and designers in the automotive industry, as well as researchers with expertise and interest in this book. It provides provides a framework for better understanding and explaining the ecological, economic, and political stakes invested in contemporary culture’s use and valuation of automobiles. The book constructs an ANT-inspired framework for rethinking automobility. In the manner of similar projects, such as Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition that establish ANT as a primary mode of analysis, the book achieves its purpose of recovering terms from ancient rhetoric—techne, kinesis, energeia, hyle, logistikos, metis, tyche, and kairos—for the purpose of demonstrating how they always, already accommodated analysis of human and nonhuman agents involved in activities, such as transportation use and design. For this reason, the book could serve as useful reading in courses on professional communication as it pertains to transportation or ANT, and as food for thought for automobile industry professionals.

Research problem: Advisory boards provide an opportunity for technical communication programs to connect consistently with industry practitioners and on-campus stakeholders, and yet few recent studies examine best practices for advisory boards in technical communication programs. Research questions: (1) What is the typical makeup of a technical communication program advisory board? (2) What function do these advisory boards serve? (3) What are the typical successes and challenges of starting and maintaining a technical communication advisory board? (4) What are best practices for starting and maintaining a successful advisory board? (5) What are the similarities and differences in how program administrators and board members perceive the benefits and functions of the board? Literature review: Literature on advisory boards in technical and business communication-and in related fields such as communication, journalism, and marketing-reports that advisory boards are beneficial and effective, though many include caveats or recommendations about ways to improve board function. Methodology: To provide perspectives from both sides of the academy-industry relationship, we conducted 18 semistructured phone, Skype, and in-person interviews with program administrators (n = 10) from a host of nationwide programs and with board members (n = 8) from a single advisory board. Results and discussion: The study finds that the typical advisory board involves a mix of industry, faculty, and student members, with an emphasis on industry members. They advise the program about its curricular concerns, often foster students' academic and professional maturation, and support the program in conflicts with university administration. The typical successes of advisory boards included positive curricular amendment and the recruitment of students for jobs and internships, while characteristic challenges included meeting logistics and board members' concerns regarding the program's response to their advice. Program administrators and board members both perceive a board as useful, but some members expressed concern about the uncertainty of their role and influence. The results suggest that all technical communication programs should seriously consider forming an advisory board based on disciplinary best practices, that existing advisory boards should ensure that they have clarified the board's role for their program, and that stakeholders are aware of and attend to their board members' concerns.

Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Jihadist organizations such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) have focused increasingly on motivating unaffiliated individuals in the United States and Western countries to carry out lone-wolf attacks in their home countries. To this end, many Jihadist organizations produce what is known as tactical technical communication. Jihadist tactical technical communication persuades individuals to act by creating identification between individuals and audiences, and by associating terrorist tactics with everyday practices such as cooking.

"Assembling Arguments: Multimodal Rhetoric & Scientific Discourse, by Jonathan Buehl." Technical Communication Quarterly, 26(1), pp. 95–96

This article examines the practices of writers in online discussion board conversations as they interpret technical documents related to a psychiatric diagnosis. Drawing from interviews with 15 participants, the author argues that writers in this context interpret and manipulate medical knowledge in unique ways that benefit the community. The author concludes that studies in technical communication should take into account all groups affected by specialized knowledge, including those with little expertise or social power.

A decade ago, I was struck by the realization that almost all of the scholarship in our field focuses on the technical communication that happens within organizations, or that is produced by organizations to engage with their members, constituents, or customers (Kimball, 2006).In our scholarship, pedagogy, and practice, we regularly assume that the basic unit for consideration, the scope, is some sort of formal organization: a corporation, a government agency, or an institution.This organizational assumption has come under increasing scrutiny by others, as well.For example, Clay Spinuzzi's influential work has gradually expanded the frame beyond the organization to more flexible and temporary alliances.In Tracing Genres through Organizations: A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design (Spinuzzi, 2003) and its more applied follow-on volume, Topsight: A Guide to Studying, Diagnosing, and Fixing Information Flow in Organizations (Spinuzzi, 2013), Spinuzzi focused primarily on communication networks and conventions within organizations.But, more recently, in All Edge: Inside the New Workplace Networks (Spinuzzi, 2015), Spinuzzi broadens his focus beyond the organization, ironically by looking at something smaller: the projectbased team.In other words, Spinuzzi's work seems to have begun with assuming the organization as the proper unit of study but has shifted to consider more contingent and nimble arrangements that cross-organizational boundaries.Of course, the organization is still an important unit of scope.Yet the organizational assumption obscures a larger view of the technical communication performed by millions of people each day on their own, working outside of, between, and even counter to organizations.This kind of technical communication existed long before the organizational assumption, but it has grown tremendously with the opportunities afforded by the Internet for people to share technical information for their own purposes, rather than on behalf of institutions.In effect, everyone who enjoys access to the Internet is now a potential technical communicator, sharing what they know about technology with the entire world.With services like YouTube, Instructables, and web forums, anyone with only a small investment in money or technology can share with users across the world the kind of information that has traditionally been the product of professional technical writers employed by corporations or government agencies.(For a more detailed discussion of this trend, please see Kimball, 2016.)These new technical communicators find a ready audience in the many people interested in knowing "how to do" something, but not "how to become" something.Examples abound, but here's a personal one.The bearings of our washing machine burned out.As it loudly tried to shake itself apart, my wife and I cast about for what to do.In previous decades, our options would have been slim.We could take the machine apart and try to diagnose and repair the problem ourselves.Naturally, our ignorance made us reluctant to take that route.We could hire a repairperson, but likely at great expense.We could simply buy a new washer, at even greater expense.Finally, we could seek formal training and become appliance repairpersons.However, such training is difficult to come by, even more costly, and slow.We would likely run out of clean clothes before we learned enough to fix the machine.And, ironically, we would likely have to learn a lot of information about fixing other kinds of machines, as well as the professional values and standards that would allow us to participate

Tactical technical communication research suggests its application to social justice. However, beyond a general advocacy of anti-institutional activity, de Certeau’s notion of tactics provides no detailed ethical framework for ethically justifying tactics. In acknowledgement of this gap, this article foregrounds the ethical thought of feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, particularly her concept of vulnerability, as a supplement for those employing tactics for social justice causes. The authors examine the technical documents produced by the hacktivist collective Anonymous.

The genre of technical description is seeing a resurgence, particularly in online locations, where new, hybrid versions have emerged. The technical explanation, one such hybrid, proliferates on the social message board site Reddit and the message board “Explain Like I’m Five,” in which answers to complex questions are crowdsourced. This study examines 233 such questions and their answers, identifying the effort needed to generate technical explanations as distributed and coordinative technical communication work.

The controversy surrounding the ending of Mass Effect 3 serves as a case study of a company’s rejection of cocreation with customers. The game designers and players battled for control of the aesthetic space of the game. The company failed to resolve their conflict effectively, allowing players to use social media to transform tactical action into strategic action. This case study has implications for technical communicators who increasingly are collaborating with users in cocreative relationships.

Aim: This research note narrates existing and continuing potential crossover between the digital humanities and writing studies. I identify synergies between the two fields’ methodologies and categorize current research in terms of four permutations, or “valences,” of the phrase “writing analytics.” These valences include analytics of writing , writing of analytics , writing as analytics , and analytics as writing . I bring recent work in the two fields together under these common labels, with the goal of building strategic alliances between them rather than to delimit or be comprehensive. I offer the valences as one heuristic for establishing connections and distinctions between two fields engaged in complementary work without firm or definitive discursive borders. Writing analytics might provide a disciplinary ground that incorporates and coheres work from these different domains. I further hope to locate the areas in which my current research in digital humanities, grounded in archival studies, might most shape writing analytics. Problem Formation: Digital humanities and writing studies are two fields in which scholars are performing massive data analysis research projects, including those in which data are writing or metadata that accompanies writing. There is an emerging environment in the Modern Language Association friendly to crossover between the humanities and writing studies, especially in work that involves digital methods and media. Writing analytics accordingly hopes to find common disciplinary ground with digital humanities, with the goal of benefitting from and contributing to conversations about the ethical application of digital methods to its research questions. Recent work to bridge digital humanities and writing studies more broadly has unfortunately focused more on territorial and usability concerns than on identifying resonances between the fields’ methodological and ethical commitments. Information Collection: I draw from a history of meta-academic literature in digital humanities and writing studies to review their shared methodological commitments, particularly in literature that recognizes and responds to pushback against the fields’ ostensible use of extra-disciplinary methods. I then turn to current research in both fields that uses and critiques computational techniques, which is most relevant to writing analytics’ articulated focus on massive data analysis. I provide a more detailed explanation, drawing from my categorization of this work, of the conversations in digital humanities surrounding the digital archives that enable data analysis. Conclusions: A review of past and current research in digital humanities and writing studies reveals shared attention to techniques for tokenizing texts at different scales for analysis, which is made possible by the curation of large corpora. Both fields are writing new genres to compose this analysis. In these genres, both fields emphasize process in their provisional work, which is sociocognitively repurposed in different rhetorical contexts. Finally, both fields recognize that the analytical methods they employ are themselves modes of composition and argumentation. An ethics of data transformation present in digital humanities, however, is largely absent from writing studies. This ethics comes to digital humanities from the influence of textual studies and archival studies. Further research in writing analytics might benefit from reframing writing corpora as archives—what Paul Fyfe (2017) calls a shift from “data mining” to “data archaeology”—in its analyses. This is especially true for analyses of text, which in particular foreground writing and analysis of writing as acts of transformation. Directions for Further Research: I recommend that future efforts to find crossover between digital humanities and writing studies do so by identifying their common values rather than trying to co-opt language and spaces or engaging in broad definitional work. I further provide a set of guiding principles that writing analytics might follow in order to pursue research that draws upon and contributes to both digital humanities and writing studies. These research projects might consider and account for the silences of writing corpora—unseen versions of documents, and documents’ elements not described in structured data—while attending to the silences that these efforts might in turn (re)produce.

Technique Identification: A new graphical technique is presented for visualizing and assessing inter-rater agreement in discrete ordinal or categorical data, such as rubric ratings.  To that aim, a chance-corrected Kappa with two new features is derived. First, it is based on interpreting ratings for each subject as vectors to visualize the data. This is done by creating two-dimensional vectors from a subject-rating summary table, sorting the vectors by their slopes, and plotting them in that order to create a trajectory that displays all the data in context. Second, it presents a graph and accompanying statistics (Kappa, p -value) for each pair of ratings in an organized display so that all useful comparisons of the data are visually displayed and statistically assessed. This information is presented on a logical grid, usually called facets . Kappa is calculated in the usual way, by referencing the actual results with an average of random rating assignments. This average becomes a reference line on each graph as a visual cue, as well. The statistical basis for the Kappa and significance testing are derived, and the test assumptions are specified. Value Contribution: The most commonly used statistics for inter-rater agreement, such as the Cohen Kappa or Inter-Class Correlation, give only a single parameter estimate of reliability from which to make judgments about ratings data. The technique presented here constructs graphs of all the data that allow visual inspection of the ratings versus a reference curve that represents chance-matching. The detailed reports on inter-rater agreement can show how to fine-tune ratings systems, such as understanding which parts of an ordinal scale are working best. This solves a practical problem for researchers who rely on rating-type classification by revealing which overall aspects of the rating system need to be improved and adds to the list of tools available for assessing rating reliability. In creating this approach to analysis of rater data, human usability is emphasized. Specifically, the use of geometry is designed to facilitate interpretability rather than being a mathematical derivation from first principles. Technique Application: Two applications are given, both involving social meaning-making. The first uses data from wine-judging to illustrate how the method can illuminate expertise in that domain. The results reproduce published findings that were based on a classical statistical method. A second sample application uses data from a university assessment of student writing in which ratings on a developmental scale are assigned by course instructors to their students. The rating program is an example of social meaning-making that can be used to generate larger data sets than are typical for classroom-based assessment programs. The analysis shows the strengths and weaknesses of the rating system in terms of reliability and demonstrates how that knowledge leads to improvements in assessment. Directions for Further Research: An argument is made for a public library of inter-rater data for empirical use by researchers. The social aspects of rating are discussed, and there is an illustration of the potential to derive new measures of inter-rater agreement from the meaning-making program that produces the data.

s someone who regularly encourages students in my technical writing and first-year composition courses to participate in public writing projects, I have often turned to scholarship based in service learning-often not writing-course specific-to look for pedagogical direction and even evidence that these approaches to teaching are meaningful for students.Fortunately, as more and more rhetoric and composition specialists teach public-oriented writing courses, the emergence of related discipline-specific scholarship, conference presentations, and workshops provides necessary assistance for compositionists whose teaching and work conflate the borders between the